Re: GG: Mapping the heart of a fugue...

[KImmoor@aol.com]

Comparing GG's music-making to a visual artist's creation?

   I think I would match the music of Gould to the art of Max Ernst (a
contemporary of Duchamp). Well, maybe not all of Ernst, but certainly works
like Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale - my favorite of his
pieces. 
   To me, Gould and his music conjure the abstract image of fury in a tiny
glass box. I can't describe it any other way; his passion and forcefulness
restrained by his fears and his fragility. The aforementioned Ernst piece
reminds me of this; the fragile matchstick fence, the brick wall that
vanishes into the sfumato of the distance, the man who balances elegantly on
the rooftop on the tip of his toe. The entire work is so delicately
constructed, so meticulously balanced, and yet so haphazardly executed; the
paint smears up onto the wooden frame, the handwriting on the bottom ledge is
uneven and clumsy - all of it so very human, just like GG's humming and
singing over the delicate bars of his music. Deliciously flawed. 
   Many of the artists in Ernst's mob, (later Duchamp, earlier Miro,
DeChirico and Schwitters) I guess you'd call them the post-Dada-emerging
Surrealists, produced works that remind me of GG. There is (to me) an obvious
connection between Duchamp's shattered glass panes and GG's "x-rays" of
music. Similarly, many of the pieces seem to represent a compulsive sort of
meticulousness despite their seemingly random execution or destructive
appearance.
   I didn't really care for the "Spheres" visual accompaniment to the GG WTC
piece. It bored me. (ooh, I am so brash! :-)